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Share in the accounts and discoveries of the many individuals who, just like you, set out to find new, true answers that could stand up to the test of passing time with its ever-changing conditions. Welcome these inward and uplifting thoughts as if they were your own, for in one sense… they are.
Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
Father Pedro Arrupe (1907 – 1991)
If you could see things as they are, not as they appear, you would no longer inflict injuries and pains on your own selves.
Seeking the way, you must exert yourselves and strive with diligence… free yourselves from the tangled net of sorrow. Walk in the path with steadfast aim. A sick man may be cured by the healing power of medicine and will be rid of all his ailments without beholding the physician.
If a foolish man is associated with a wise man, even all his life, the foolish man will understand truth as little as a spoon understands the taste of soup.
A stone beneath the surface of the ground is just as heavy as a visible one.
Great endeavors and hard struggles await those who are converted, but afterwards inexpressible joy. If you want to light a fire, you are troubled at first by smoke, and your eyes water. But in the end you achieve your aim. Now it is written: Our God is a consuming fire. So we must light the divine fire in us with tears and struggle.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Who looks outside, dreams… who looks inside, awakes.
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
God dwells in you, as you, and you don’t have to “do” anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state. Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry is the one direct and immediate way.
The thing about our choices is that after we have made them, they turn around and make us.
Every living being longs always to be happy, untainted by sorrow; and everyone has the greatest love for himself, which is solely due to the fact that happiness is his real nature. Hence, in order to realize that inherent and untainted happiness, which indeed he daily experiences when the mind is subdued in deep sleep, it is essential that he should know himself. For obtaining such knowledge the inquiry “Who am I?” in quest of the Self is the best means.
Love between human beings springs from a desire to be made free of another world than one’s own. Every true communion of lovers is a mutual discovery and recognition. Every passion is a passion for release, for that loss of one’s self by which alone one gains life.
At bottom there is but one subject of study… the mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.
You must perform your spiritual exercises without prophesying the nature of your reward. If you have a preconceived notion of the reward, you may or may not get it, but the very desire for that reward blocks the higher reward, which is above all mental prophecy. As you actually receive a few higher rewards, and your cosmic confidence rises, you feel from yourself that this way, which was at first so strange and frightening, is the way of endless riches.
Day by day we are born as night retires, no more possessing aught of our former life, estranged from our course of yesterday, and beginning today the life that remains.
It is an extraordinary fact and an extraordinary piece of evidence for the truth of religion, that a person’s long hours spent in silent communication with God, who never directly answers, is nevertheless manifestly a two-way communication. Such a person is gradually and permanently altered in the depths of his personality in ways which would be inconceivable if there was really nothing there at all.
Nothing will protect us from external compulsion as much as the control of ourselves, and, as Seneca says, to submit yourself to reason is the way to make everything else submit to you.
If a man is a good judge of silver, he will know, for the coin will tell its own story.
Little minds are too much hurt by little events. Great minds understand all of them, and remain untouched.
The stakes are high for real prayer.
You must gamble yourself
and be willing to lose.
When you have done this,
and your self shakes off
what you believed your self to be,
then no prayer remains,
only a sparkle of the eyes.
Knower and known are one.
If you penetrate the center of time and space,
You can bypass the addictions of the world,
You can become the world yourself.
For this is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love.
If thou but settest foot on this path, thou shalt see it everywhere.
No one can conquer an enemy without coming in site of him.
